A tenth of Earth’s land surface is permanently occupied by ice sheets or glaciers, but the domain of the cryosphere – that part of the world where snow and ice can form – extends three times further still.

The cryosphere is an important regulator of global climate, its bright albedo reflecting sunlight back to space and its presence influencing regional weather and global ocean currents. Some 77% of the globes freshwater are bound up within the ice – but the cryosphere appears disproportionately sensitive to the effects of global warming.

Radar altimeters gather data on changing ice height and mass: in 2009 ESA launched CryoSat-2 as the first altimetry mission specifically designed to accurately measure the thickness of sea ice and land ice margins.

12 July 2017

Over the last few months, a chunk of Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf has been hanging on precariously as a deep crack cut across the ice. Witnessed by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, a lump of ice more than twice the size of Luxembourg has now broken off, spawning one of the largest icebergs on record and changing the outline of the Antarctic Peninsula forever.

05 July 2017

The enormous permafrost areas of the world show seasonal change
which has impact on not only vegetation and hydrological cycles,
but also on the planning and safety of huge gas and oil pipelines
which traverse these areas.

Sea ice is formed from ocean water that freezes, whether along
coasts or to the sea floor (fast ice) or floating on the surface
(drift ice) or packed together (pack ice). The most important areas
of pack ice are the polar ice packs. Because of vast amounts of
water added to or removed from the oceans and atmosphere, the
behavior of polar ice packs have a significant impact of the global
changes in climate.

The study of snow and ice is aimed at monitoring the environmental
conditions of some of the most inaccessible parts of the world.
This includes the study of animal migration, ice mass balance,
snowpack conditions, and monitoring of iceberg movement for ship
routing.